When you are sick or need to research a disease for an ailing relative, the two best places to go online are health search engines like Healthline or patient support group sites like Daily Strength. Tel Aviv startup iMedix wants to combine both: a vertical health search engine with a patient-to-patient social network. Tomorrow it officially switches to beta, although the previously invite-only site has been open about a week.
iMedix is a social search engine focussed on healthcare that has raised $2 million from angel investors. When you type in a search term, an auto-completed list of health and medical terms pops down to help guide your search. Type in “toe,” and it suggests “wound of toenail,” “tingling toe” “broken toe,” “blue toes,” “absence of toe,” and “hammer toe,” among others. Along the side column are profiles of iMedix members who may be interested in health topics related to the search. In this case, “sport injuries.” If the iMedix members are online, you can start a chat with them. If they are not online, you can send them an e-mail.
So as you search, you not only find links to health articles and other information on the Web, you also find other people you can talk to about that health topic. The idea, says co-founder Iri Amirav, is not only “to change the way patients make health-related decisions, but we also want those patients to connect together with other patients. So that with one click, they can connect with others who suffer the same disease.”
Each member creates a profile with as much or little information as they like, including tags indicating what health categories, diseases, and medical conditions they are interested in. These tags are informed by the same auto-complete database used for search terms so that both people and search terms can be matched more easily.
The other social aspect of the site is that each search result can be voted up or down. The site is based on the open-source Lucene search engine, which then gets trained by the users to generate better results. You don’t need to be a member to use the search engine. Anyone can vote a result up or down. But a member’s vote carries more weight, and the more active members carry the most weight.
The original concept for iMedix was a blogging platform for patients. That has evolved to more private forms of patient-to-patent communication, coupled with a health information resource that all members can help make better. Blogging will probably be worked back into the site, but erring on the side of privacy to begin with is a good idea. Although, all that valuable information in the one-on-one chats is being lost. Perhaps there should be an option to make chats public if both parties agree and think that others can benefit. There should also be the ability to vote on people to help sort out who are the best authorities on a topic-by-topic basis. But all in all, iMedix is off to a healthy start.
Now that’s a lucrative niche!
No Wonder Jeff Pulver thinks Tel Aviv is the startup capital of the world
http://pulverbl...ves/007710.html
Nice !! But the main thing that I am worried about is that how many people would like to discuss/disclose their personal health problems with random people on the internet. Its ok if things are kept annonymous but how much annonymity can one maintain in this kind of a setup.
Good point Ballu, but check the people page on Imedix and see the hundreds of people that uploaded their pics. Facebook changed the game and now we are seeing this everywhere. I can only imagine what it will do to our healthcare system. michael moore was right !!!
Good Luck!
Your site looks amazing
Looks great!
“You have herpes, share with a friend?”
OR
“Find other users tagged as schizophrenic”
Come back Facebook, all is forgiven!
I always wonder how much you guys charge these websites for a post,
Good Luck Imedix
The best health website Ive seen….
Beitar Yerushalaim IMPERIA
Gam be-TechCrunch
What about insurance companies fishing through these websites?
I have always wondered how safe it is for patients to give advice to other patients. Has anyone here been on a mental health support site? It’s quite something to see someone manic or depress trying to give advice to others.
We must be very careful not to empower patients to review/badmouth our physicians. People that are not themselves educated in the field are not in a position to criticize the practices of a true professional nor should they be taken seriously. Commenting on how friendly a doctor is one thing…everything else is another.
Don’t get me wrong, I think that a social network where patients can discuss ailments and healing could blossom into a wonderful thing. I just don’t want to hear some ignorant recipient of medical care tell me how to choose how I recieve my care!
Looks to me alot like http://www.PatientsLikeme.com
I’m not sure why people are so willing to put up their medical data next to their identifying information, nor how sites that facilitate this practice are in compliance with federal statutes on patient privacy.
@StartupEarth – you never share herpes with friends, only with frenemies.
haHA!!!
sorry.
@Ballu – a gigantic number of people want to share their health problems with complete strangers. it’s a version of shouting into the void – you’re not sure that anyone is there to hear, but it’s cathartic all the same.
I don’t feel so well after wasting my time reading this …. **barfff… ugh***
I want to be that chicks friend, I don’t care if she is autistic and prone to fainting. She’s Hot!!!
Erick, you wrote: “If the iMedix members are online, you can start a chat with them. If they are not online, you can send them an e-mail.” interesting site, but I believe you meant sending them a message. Am I missing something? Please enlighten us.
@TC Girl, that’s correct you can send a message to another member. You get an inbox with your profile. Every time you get a new message, you are notified by e-mail, just like with Facebook.
I had the pleasure of working with iMedix back in the Summer of 2006. In all honesty, they are among the most talented teams I’ve met. The two founders–Amir Leitersdorf & Iri Amirav–are not only smart, they are also fluent with the dynamics of building a business model in the online healthcare space.
I’ve said it before and but it’s worth repeating… Expect a liquidation event for iMedix in the next 2-3 years.
i don’t really get it???
is it a website worth a techcrunch review?
this field already has dailystrength big time, patientslikeme getting bigger, organisedwisdom exactly the same but better, mdjunction gaining speed, wellsphere looking good…..
do we really need some guy from israel with dreadlocks to tell me how to live my life?
Ann,
You sound like a fascist person.
FYI.
John – i have a feeling you are one of these guys….
ohhhmmm come to think about it, all the good comments here seem a bit off:
“Dana, December 10th, 2007 at 8:54 am
Good Luck Imedix
The best health website Ive seen….”
ha ha – the site has nothing, its empty! how can it be good.
(well i guess you’re from israel too…)
Nice to see this niche getting more coverage. But this site is quite rough around the edges if you ask me.
Another site I’ve used for good health content — http://www.taumed.com — has much better community tools and a much better health search feature that integrates community content, web content and A.D.A.M. content.
TauMed’s site doesn’t mention raising any cash yet. Maybe they should and compete with these light weights like iMedix, Revolution, Healthline et al.
-Charlie
This is not a new concept and has been in various places for years. In fact, Medhelp.org at http://www.medhelp.org has been doing it for 14 years (before WebMD existed) and this year has already done a lot of the Web 2.0 items imedix is saying is new such as messaging between members, user profiles, tagging, etc.
Patientslikeme and dailystrength have also done this for the past couple of years.
It is a good idea, but I’d rather go to the sites that already have millions of members signed up so I can connect with someone.
As for iMedix being a brand new website, it has apparently made a very good impression on enough people.
iMedix was very recently chosen as a finalist in the “Best new start-ups of 2007” category at TC’s Crunchies competition. Which is a pretty respected achievement for according to TC; they had a very large number of nominations (82k).
http://www.tech...or-the-winners/
To vote for Best new start-up of 2007 – http://vote.cru...ry/view/new2007
Wellescent.com (http://www.wellescent.com) is another new site in the healthcare community genre where members can share their health, surgery and medication experiences with others in a more private manner than a number of other sites.
On-site email, instant messaging and blogs facilitate communication and additional tools allow personal research information to be shared.